Avoidance of Muslims weakens sympathy for individual Muslim victims.

Evidence

Political and social discourse involving Muslims has been heated, and it has, at times, demonstrated a lack of sympathy for Muslims. … However, participants’ avoidant feelings for Muslims in general appear to mitigate their feelings of sympathy for a suffering Muslim, which means that Islamophobia may be examined in relation to media coverage of events involving Muslims. — Sherman A. Lee, Chelsea A. Reid, Stephen D. Short, Jeffrey A. Gibbons, Ruth Yeh, and Matthew L. Campbell, Fear of Muslims, 143

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to The Reluctant Fundamentalist, where personal sympathy and generalized suspicion of Muslims pull against each other in Changez’s relationship with the American narrator.
• SEED: Angle: how ‘scaling up’ of mosque-coverage news converts private discomfort into public policy mood.